On the morning of May 5, 1945, a counterattack from Japanese forces overran the American position at the top of the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa. The surviving soldiers of Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment retreated to the cliff’s edge and descended. Among the roughly 155 men who had gone up that morning, the wounded stayed at the top. One man stayed with them. He had no weapon. He had a rope, a litter, and a knot he’d learned in West Virginia. He worked for approximately five hours, lowering wounded soldiers down the face of the escarpment one at a time, talking quietly to each man as he worked. When it was over, the Army credited him with saving approximately 75 lives. His name was Desmond Thomas Doss, and he was 26 years old.
## The Man Behind the Contradiction
The simplest version of Desmond Doss’s story is a paradox: a soldier who would not carry a weapon won the Medal of Honor in one of the war’s most brutal battles. The actual story is more specific and more human — a matter of a particular faith, a particular childhood, a particular man who meant exactly what he said about what he would and would not do.
Doss was born February 7, 1919, in Lynchburg, Virginia, to William Thomas Doss, a carpenter, and Bertha Oliver Doss, who worked in a shoe factory when the family needed the income. He grew up in the Fairview Heights area of Lynchburg with an older sister, Audrey, and a younger brother, Harold. The family attended the Park Avenue Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Doss’s mother made sure her children understood what that faith required.